I thought on writing this in the "anti-Resettlement" thread, because it is related, but I did feel this topic deserves its own thread.

So I found myself again arguing with deniers today. One of them was the infamous Swiss denier you may remember from previous thread of mine.

So this guy is a big fan of the "resettlement" theory and constantly saying the Nazis deported Jews into the "Russian East", just like the Korherr Report suggests.
According to the Swiss, the Soviets, on their turn, hid the whole thing and might have sent the Jews to the gulags in Siberia, where the Jews have perished, and that explains the 6 million victims (not in the hand of Nazis, but in the hand of Soviets.)

This is a shtick, of course. Saying "the Jews were sent to the Gulags" is pretty much like saying they were sent into a black hole and does not provide any reasonable explanation about how millions of Jews were deported eastwards without leaving any evidence and why there was no sign of life from them after the war has over.

So he tried a different approach and quoted the following out of Wikipedia :

By 1941, it was estimated that the Soviet Union was home to 4.855 million Jews, around 30% of all Jews worldwide. However, the majority of these were residents of rural western Belarus and Ukraine—populations that suffered greatly due to the German occupation and the Holocaust. Only around 800,000 Jews lived outside the occupied territory, and 1,200,000 to 1,400,000 Jews were eventually evacuated eastwards.[83] Of the three million left in occupied areas, the vast majority is thought to have perished in German extermination camps.

Fixating on the word "evacuated", he suggested that up to 66% of the evacuated Jews mentioned here (1.2 to 1.4 million) were not able to survive this evacuation - and that explains some of the Holocaust victims.
This is another shtick, of course. He tried to say "eastwards" means Siberia. But no. Western Russia is heavily populated - being evacuated eastwards means probably to some city or town not far from the front line. There is no reason to assume that Jews who evacuated from the incoming German front line have perished until they reached their destination.

But this is not my question.
My question is what do we know about this said evacuation mentioned in the text? Did the Soviet evacuate 1.2-1.4 Jews as the German army advanced? What is the known information about that?

Oozy, I'm traveling and without reference books (I don't cart my library with me to Sweden ) so I don't want to get into data I may screw up. OTOH one of the books I brought with me, by coincidence, is Edele, Fitzpatrick, & Grossman, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union. When I get to read it, I will share what I find in this thread. A usable source would be Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union - each chapter starts with demographic data on flight/etc. The high level answer is simply that the Jews who were either in the unoccupied USSR or who fled to the USSR (or were included in the Soviet evacuations) are not counted amongst the 5+ million victims of the Holocaust. That's why Arad - I don't know the quality of his data - and other serious authors writing about this topic take pains to separate out Jews who left and Jews who stayed behind in each area of the occupied USSR.

Statistical Mechanic wrote:Oozy, I'm traveling and without reference books (I don't cart my library with me to Sweden ) so I don't want to get into data I may screw up. OTOH one of the books I brought with me, by coincidence, is Edele, Fitzpatrick, & Grossman, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union. When I get to read it, I will share what I find in this thread. A usable source would be Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union - each chapter starts with demographic data on flight/etc. The high level answer is simply that the Jews who were either in the unoccupied USSR or who fled to the USSR (or were included in the Soviet evacuations) are not counted amongst the 5+ million victims of the Holocaust. That's why Arad - I don't know the quality of his data - and other serious authors writing about this topic take pains to separate out Jews who left and Jews who stayed behind in each area of the occupied USSR.

Hmm.. is there any reason to believe these evacuation caused casualties among the Jews? I mean, it seems to me it's just evacuating them to a nearby city, away from the front?

Altshuler, Mordechai. 1993. "Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion." The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945. Edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock. London: M.E. Sharpe.

Not sure where he got his 66% figure but most likely he pulled it out of thin air. Just to be clear, the Soviets relocated something like 12m people away from the Nazi advance - they didn’t drive to a nearby city but were moved to industrial areas and further east and even some southwards IIRC. Jews were among this migration.

Relevant to HD arguments that Stalinist agencies did in the Jews and that this explains their mass disappearance from eastern Europe its an observation of Levene’s (The Crisis of Genocide vol II, p 350) that during WWII “within key [Soviet state] directorates such as labour and resettlement (including deportations), . . . the Jewish preponderance was overwhelming:” thus the denier argument is that Jews in these agencies responsible for forcibly expelling and moving people were the ones who deported, and destroyed, millions of Jews. How this argument comports with deniers' also wittering about Judeo-Bolshevism is further anomalous.

Not exactly the most reliable of sources, but in this case, I think Solzhenitsyn makes a good observation in "200 Years Together": 2.7 million Soviet Jews came under Nazi control whilst 2.2 million managed to avoid the Nazis. His sources are M. Koupovetski (French spelling) and Arad.

I remember a denier at RODOH using Solzhenitsyn's figures to try to prove that most Soviet Jews escaped the Nazis. When I pointed out the 2.7 million he forgot to mention he went off in a huff...to write up his tale in Inconvenient Histories. At the time, there was no English translation of the book. I got it in French. I do think the guy died a couple of years ago. I can't remember his name.

I am traveling today but have started the book I mentioned on Jews in the USSR during the war. The focus is on Polish Jews and Jews in territories occupied by the USSR in ‘39. In a day or two I can post some numbers based on the most recent research. I’ll take shots of tables on the data. Right now I am trying to get down from the mountains through 2 ft of snow.

iwh wrote:Not exactly the most reliable of sources, but in this case, I think Solzhenitsyn makes a good observation in "200 Years Together": 2.7 million Soviet Jews came under Nazi control whilst 2.2 million managed to avoid the Nazis. His sources are M. Koupovetski (French spelling) and Arad.

I remember a denier at RODOH using Solzhenitsyn's figures to try to prove that most Soviet Jews escaped the Nazis. When I pointed out the 2.7 million he forgot to mention he went off in a huff...to write up his tale in Inconvenient Histories. At the time, there was no English translation of the book. I got it in French. I do think the guy died a couple of years ago. I can't remember his name.

Oozy_Substance wrote:Hmm.. is there any reason to believe these evacuation caused casualties among the Jews? I mean, it seems to me it's just evacuating them to a nearby city, away from the front?

Here's the notes I made on the following USC Shoah Foundation video when I watched it in 2013. Her story is genuinely heartbreaking.

Miriam 'Lola' Reitzenstein née Blechman (born April 15, 1931) from Zamość, not far from Bełżec

When Germany invaded Poland, family went to live in a forest

Mother (aged 40) dies within a week

Family flees into Soviet occupied Poland, but the father immediately decided they'd prefer it under the German rule. Soviets won't let them return, deported to Siberia c.1940

Sister (aged 18ish) dies in Siberia

1943 - Moved on to Uzbekistan

Father dies, just four kids left, aged between 8 - 16

Two youngest kids get evacuated to Palestine (she said they were supposed to have be taken to England but, she added, "that's a whole different story"), Miriam was to go too, but didn't want to leave eldest sister on her own

1944, eldest sister dies, Miriam is on her own In Uzbekistan, aged just 12 or 13

_________

She talks about the starvation, rapes, torture, deportations (in cattle cars), cannibalism, mass graves, prison camps, and the lost three members of her family deep inside the SU, all at the hands of the Soviets.

"I believe that when the history of the [Great] war comes to be impartially written, the two greatest results will be the establishment of the national Jewish home and the creation of the League of Nations. The two are not really disconnected. They represent the two great ideas for which we fought and by which we conquered—the ideas of nationalism and internationalism."
- Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, March 1923.

iwh wrote:Not exactly the most reliable of sources, but in this case, I think Solzhenitsyn makes a good observation in "200 Years Together": 2.7 million Soviet Jews came under Nazi control whilst 2.2 million managed to avoid the Nazis. His sources are M. Koupovetski (French spelling) and Arad.

I remember a denier at RODOH using Solzhenitsyn's figures to try to prove that most Soviet Jews escaped the Nazis. When I pointed out the 2.7 million he forgot to mention he went off in a huff...to write up his tale in Inconvenient Histories. At the time, there was no English translation of the book. I got it in French. I do think the guy died a couple of years ago. I can't remember his name.

When Heink stumbled on to the Kulischer book he cites in the article, he thought he'd found the holy grail. Attempts to disabuse him of that notion failed and the stubborn old nazi {!#%@} clung to it like a nasty old dog with a bone.

Oozy_Substance wrote:Hmm.. is there any reason to believe these evacuation caused casualties among the Jews? I mean, it seems to me it's just evacuating them to a nearby city, away from the front?

Here's the notes I made on the following USC Shoah Foundation video when I watched it in 2013. Her story is genuinely heartbreaking.

Miriam 'Lola' Reitzenstein née Blechman (born April 15, 1931) from Zamość, not far from Bełżec

When Germany invaded Poland, family went to live in a forest

Mother (aged 40) dies within a week

Family flees into Soviet occupied Poland, but the father immediately decided they'd prefer it under the German rule. Soviets won't let them return, deported to Siberia c.1940

Sister (aged 18ish) dies in Siberia

1943 - Moved on to Uzbekistan

Father dies, just four kids left, aged between 8 - 16

Two youngest kids get evacuated to Palestine (she said they were supposed to have be taken to England but, she added, "that's a whole different story"), Miriam was to go too, but didn't want to leave eldest sister on her own

1944, eldest sister dies, Miriam is on her own In Uzbekistan, aged just 12 or 13

_________

She talks about the starvation, rapes, torture, deportations (in cattle cars), cannibalism, mass graves, prison camps, and the lost three members of her family deep inside the SU, all at the hands of the Soviets.

More to come, this note is based on the introduction to Edele, Fitzpatrick & Grossman, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (2017).

This comment addresses what Oozy asked about. It will not detail how in the USSR Jews "endur[ed] hunger, disease, exhaustion, mistreatment . . . "; were compelled, like others in the country, to "work or die"; or suffered rape and other abuse, often in prison camps which survivors have described in ways that resemble descriptions of KLs.

Rather the note focuses on the question raised by Oozy - whether the numbers of Jews who perished in flight or deportation to the Soviet interior, or by other means, can explain a sizable number of Jewish deaths attributed to the Germans and their allies. The answer, based on what Edele, Fitzpatrick & Grossman write is "no."

I will add more later. Here is only a summary of the high-level numbers which the authors discuss in their introduction. There is a statistical chapter by Edele and Warlik which I will post about (when I read it!).

- of Poland's prewar Jewish population of 3 million, about 1.5 million Polish Jews were brought under Soviet authority when borders were redrawn under German-Soviet agreements in September 1939; some of these had fled the Wehrmacht (250-300,000) whilst most (1.3 million) were simply living in the newly Soviet territory

- over a quarter million Jews in the Baltic states and some 100s of 1000s of Romanian Jews (Bessarabia) also came under Soviet rule, so that the USSR added about 2 million Jews to its population in 1939-1940

- of these Jews prior to 22 June 1941 (a) about 70,000 were deported eastward in the 3 large deportations of 1940 and the last such deportation of June 1941, conducted by the Soviets and involving Poles, Lithuanians, and others including Jews; (b) 23,600 were arrested and imprisoned in the above and other actions; (c) no more than 21,000 joined the Red Army; (c) no more than 53,000 left for work in the Soviet interior. Thus, no more (and probably fewer) than about 175,000 Jews had been moved (or went) to areas out of reach of the Germans before Barbarossa was launched.

- at the outset of Barbarossa, another approximately 210,000 Jews evacuated eastwards as part of the more general Soviet evacuations including those of suspect (in Soviet eyes) and foreign residents of the western areas

- "These figures mean that, at the very least, 146,100 and as many as 384,600 were saved from the Holocaust by the often harsh haven of the Soviet Union. This range is consistent with the figure of 200,000 - 230,000 used by many recent historians."

It is not correct to think that throughout the war all these Jews (see above) were in the Gulag; indeed, during 1940-1941 many of the refugees were also given jobs in different parts of the USSR and not until Soviet policy changes (which led to the mass deportations of refugees as well as of residents of newly acquired territory) were they sent to labor camps, to special zones (for capitalists and potential enemies of the USSR), or to various prisons and detention sites. Often survivors say that they were shipped to "Siberia," but "Siberia" could mean Siberia or Kazakhstan or even northern Russia west of the Urals, etc. When the Soviets conducted the infamous mass deportations from their new territories in 1940 and June 1941, many Jewish refugees were sent to labor camps as well as to other detention sites. Treated as suspect foreigners at this time (far from comrades in Judeo-Bolshevism), the Polish Jews saw a relaxation of policy later: as the war progressed some of the refugees who had been placed in detention were subsequently released (there was an amnesty in August 1941), and many of these people settled in Central Asia no longer in detention.

Skimming ahead, I see that in the chapter on statistics, Edele and Warlik give reason to doubt both the low and high figures in the range stated above. No mortality estimate is given in the introduction but by inference mortality could not have been anywhere approaching the scale Oozy's denier has tossed out (for example, one contributor to the volume discusses the "more than 200,000 Polish Jews" who survived the war in the USSR).

(As I said above, I don't have Arad's book or others with me, so cannot cross-check these data with other works.)

The detention of Poles and Jews and the large deportation actions of 1940 and June 1941 placed many Polish Jews into a large number of small, dispersed labor camps where they faced very harsh conditions. In his chapter on "cultural amnesia" among the Jewish refugees, Goldlust describes the hard forced labor and deplorable camp conditions as typical for camps during this period (reminiscent of KLs, for example but with such ameliorations as heating stoves in quarters, some education opportunities, ability to send mail and receive packages in some cases). Goldlust estimates that 70,000 of the Jewish refugees in Soviet territory were deported or imprisoned in the two waves (recent research by Edele and Warlik, as noted above); Goldlust says, citing a 2010 study by Albert Kaganovich, "10 percent of the Jewish refugees did not survive the experience" of deportation and incarceration, with mortality high among young children and babies. We are a far cry from 66% of 1.2-1.4 million perishing . . .

Statistical Mechanic wrote:. . . Goldlust says, citing a 2010 study by Albert Kaganovich, "10 percent of the Jewish refugees did not survive the experience" of deportation and incarceration, with mortality high among young children and babies. We are a far cry from 66% of 1.2-1.4 million perishing . . .

Goldlust further reminds us of the Polish-Soviet agreement of August 1941, following Barbarossa, which led to the Soviet "amnesty" and widespread releases of those refugees held in camps, as described above: at this time Polish liaison officials who now worked in the USSR supported exit of refugees, who received official papers, and helped them resettle and find work, with large numbers heading for the more temperate Central Asia SSRs. (One reason, it is important to recall, that the refugees had been placed into detention during the period of the Non-Aggression Pact was that many decided against accepting Soviet citizenship and thus caused worry over their loyalty whilst in the USSR; the amnesty releases came in most cases after about 1 year of detention. With the USSR joining the Allies and reaching a difficult accommodation with the Polish government in exile, to some degree, for a period of time - until the Katyn revelations - the situation was eased.)

Another result of the Soviet-Polish August 1941 agreement was that the Soviets allowed the creation of the Polish Anders army (which was to be sent via Iran to hook up with British forces in the Middle East); the Anders army recruited Polish refugees in the Soviet Union; about 6,000 Polish Jewish refugees were among those who joined.

Balmoral95 wrote:Imagine my surprise what one can learn by reading books instead of watching You Tube.

Imagine my surprise to see in the book I am reading that the authors make use of interviews in the Video History Archive (USC Shoah Foundation) - one contribution in fact built from interviews in the archive (and discussing some of the issues with those interviews). This book was in my hands before BROI's startling and revealing tangent to this discussion, which means, hold on to your horses, that these researchers were able to find and consult the VHA without BROI's assistance! Holy moly!

iwh wrote:Not exactly the most reliable of sources, but in this case, I think Solzhenitsyn makes a good observation in "200 Years Together": 2.7 million Soviet Jews came under Nazi control whilst 2.2 million managed to avoid the Nazis. His sources are M. Koupovetski (French spelling) and Arad.

I remember a denier at RODOH using Solzhenitsyn's figures to try to prove that most Soviet Jews escaped the Nazis. When I pointed out the 2.7 million he forgot to mention he went off in a huff...to write up his tale in Inconvenient Histories. At the time, there was no English translation of the book. I got it in French. I do think the guy died a couple of years ago. I can't remember his name.

When Heink stumbled on to the Kulischer book he cites in the article, he thought he'd found the holy grail. Attempts to disabuse him of that notion failed and the stubborn old nazi {!#%@} clung to it like a nasty old dog with a bone.

With what materials I have in Sweden with me, I cannot provide much help on the 1.3 million or so Polish Jews who became Soviet subjects, so to speak, following the events of August-September 1939, by remaining in place. But, as to Oozy's denier's argument, they remained in place and thus were neither "saved by Stalin" nor killed (66% of them) in the Soviet interior: the high % who died, died from other causes (hint: they were "in place" - about 1.3million of those remaining being Polish Jews - where the EGs and other mobile killing units svept the occupied Soviet Union).

Unfortunately Shelter from the Holocaust doesn't deal with total number of Jews who moved from elsewhere to the interior after Barbarossa (in her chapter, Fitzpatrick gives the total number of Jews, inclusive of the Polish Jews, fleeing or evacuating from German occupied territory as 1.5 million). Arad, as noted, details these larger population movements at the time of Barbarossa. As far as their mortality, as will be seen below, the Polish Jews suffered especially high mortality during 1940-1941 when many were deported, as suspected disloyal foreigners, to detention sites in "Siberia" - a situation which most of the Soviet Jews didn't face. Without my sources, however, and with a crappy memory, I won't address Soviet Jewry as a whole here . . .

Which brings us back to the Polish Jews who fled or were evacuated into the interior from these areas incorporated into the Soviet Union after fall 1939 - western Belorussia, western Ukraine, and the Baltic countries. In their statistical chapter Edele and Warlik explain how the data have gaps and contradictions, depending on sources and biases; therefore, they work in ranges and are unable to come to precise, specific numbers.

Edele and Warlik discuss mortality, based on subjective accounts as well as what the data say. Many (see above - about 70,000) of the Polish Jews were sent to Gulag colonies (not Gulag camps); in Gulag colonies, according to Edele and Warlik, mortality among the general population of those detained ranged from 2% to 27% per year (the spike came in 1942-1943, by when most Polish Jews had been released). Edele and Warlik have data on the 3rd deportation of June 1940: by April 1941 (a few months before the amnesty releases) mortality among the Polish Jews was 2.5%, right in line with the general figure of 2.4% in Gulag colonies for 1941, the time when the deported Jews were in the colonies. The authors stress that the highest mortality rates were for children and women; in any event, whilst conditions were harsh, and the labor cruel, even those detained in work settlements and other sites during 1940-1941 were neither worked to death in large numbers nor died en masse in epidemics. And these places of detention during 1940-1941 made for the worst conditions by far that the Polish refugees in the USSR faced: remember that after summer 1941, most Polish Jews were released from detention and made their way to the more temperate Central Asian region where they found work, went to school, etc. - no longer subject to Soviet punitive measures.

Oozy's denier is clearly pulling numbers like 66% mortality rate out of his ass.

According to Edele and Warlik,

* fewer than (they are not able to specify exactly how many fewer) than 375,000 Polish Jews fled to the USSR (there are estimates as low as about 160,000 - Edele and Warlik say that their study leads them toward the lower end but "likely somewhere in between these two signposts")
* 6,000 or so Polish Jews made their way to Japan, Turkey, or Iran from the USSR
* perhaps 7,000 Polish Jews left the USSR with the Anders army (small numbers were conscripted into or volunteered for the Red Army)
* as many as 20,000 Polish Jews may have returned to Poland with the Berling army
* after the war, the Soviets processed nearly 250,000 Poles for repatriation to Poland but cleared only about 225,000; the exact number of these who were Jews is not clear but was probably over 150,000 (Gottschalk, in UNRRA archive) - official registration figures likely missed some 10s of 1000s who hadn’t come to the authorities attention
* some 10s of 1000s of Polish Jews chose to remain in, or were unable to get out, of the Soviet Union in 1945-1946
* most of the repatriated Jews left Poland, most of them entering DP camps, in which were found about 180,000 Polish Jews in 1946

If we take an estimate "somewhere between these two signposts," for example, accepting that 300,000 Polish Jews fled to the USSR (I choose this number because it's the high estimate of the volume's editors), then we have, from the incomplete data, perhaps 260,000-265,000 of these Polish Jews who went to the Soviet interior accounted for at war's end, maybe somewhat fewer. That would place mortality at maybe 35,000 (or 12% - as against the USSR's total population loss during the war of 14%) or 45,000. Given the flux in the numbers, as high as 15% or so mortality wouldn't appear out of line.

In her chapter Atina Grossmann estimates that between 1945-1949 as many as 230,000 Polish Jews were repatriated to Poland - this figure doesn’t count the thousands who fled through the Middle East during the war. Nor does it include of course the Polish Jews who remained in the USSR or (best I can tell) Red Army returnees. Citing Yosef Litvak she says that 55% of the 230,700 repatriated Jews were male and that 20% were children. She gives examples of testimonies from Jews who’d survived in Poland and were astonished to see intact families of Polish Jews returning. Litvak, notes Grossmann, found that “between 85 and 90 percent of all the Polish refugees in the Soviet Union were repatriated” eventually. Grossmann’s estimates are congruent with the data I used in the posts above.

A 15 Dec 1942 report by the Palestine Police HQ claims Ben Gurion was telling the Poles there were "some 600,000 Polish Jewish refugees still in Russia" and some "450,000 Polish Jews now in America, England, South Africa and other countries". - UK NA: CO 733/444/14

"I believe that when the history of the [Great] war comes to be impartially written, the two greatest results will be the establishment of the national Jewish home and the creation of the League of Nations. The two are not really disconnected. They represent the two great ideas for which we fought and by which we conquered—the ideas of nationalism and internationalism."
- Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, March 1923.

Laurie Jockusch estimates 50,000 Polish Jews remained in the USSR after the war; this seems like a high estimate given some of the other estimates we’ve seen - but if the number of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union was north of 300,000 - or if the number of repatriates was toward the lower end of the range cited above, it is plausible.

Further complicating the data, Eliyana Adler raises the issue of Jewish refugees from Poland who in 1939 through early 1941 “crossed the border several times, unsure as to where they would fare better . . . no one can accurately chart these multiple and bidirectional flight patterns.” She hypothesizes that the estimates of larger numbers of refugees in the ranges we’ve been seeing could include many Jews who took temporary refuge in this way. In any event, not all Jews who crossed into Soviet territory before Barbarossa fled, or were evacuated, into the Soviet interior after 22 June 1941.

Oozy, Edele & Warlik rely in large part on statistics from contemporary agencies for their estimates.

The authors prioritize NKVD data for the numbers deported (preferring those data to data of the Polish government in exile); for numbers of repatriated Jews they prefer the data of the repatriation commissions to data gathered by the Polish localities which contain double counts; for various wartime movements they utilize data from the Jewish Agency, Polish Defense Ministry, British Foreign Office, and others; for total numbers of Polish Jews in Soviet territory and numbers fleeing to the interior after Barbarossa they utilize data from the Soviet government (these data give estimates on the low-end of the ranges we've seen), the Jewish Agency (!), records of the Foreign Office in the USSR, and a variety of secondary sources rather than relying on what David Ben Gurion was reported to have said, which is an option (the Contemporary Jew gambit) some choose - such as picking an item mentioning Ben Gurion, rather than using other guesses from the period that have also been shown to be inflated or using a range of contemporary and secondary sources, hoping that the famous name on its own will muddy the waters.

NAZI-SOVIET RELATIONS 1939-1941 - Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office
Memorandum by the State Secretary in the German Foreign Office Ernst von Weizsäcker

St. S. Nr. 949
BERLIN, December 5, 1939.

Colonel General Keitel telephoned me today on the following matter: Lately there have been repeated wrangles on the boundary between Russia and the Government General, into which the army, too, was drawn. The expulsion of Jews into Russian territory, in particular, did not proceed as smoothly as had apparently been expected. In practice, the procedure was, for example, that at a quiet place in the woods, a thousand Jews were expelled across the Russian border; 15 kilometers away, they came back, with the Russian commander trying to force the German one to readmit the group. As it was a case involving foreign policy, the O. K. W. was not able to issue directives to the Governor General in the matter. Naval Captain Bürkner will get in touch with the desk officer at the Foreign Office. Colonel General Keitel asked me to arrange for a favorable outcome of this interview.

"I believe that when the history of the [Great] war comes to be impartially written, the two greatest results will be the establishment of the national Jewish home and the creation of the League of Nations. The two are not really disconnected. They represent the two great ideas for which we fought and by which we conquered—the ideas of nationalism and internationalism."
- Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, March 1923.